Technical Solutions Used To Develop Software

To gather insights for DZone's Software Development Research Guide, scheduled for release in July, 2016, we spoke to 18 executives, from 15 companies, who have created software for their companies, as well as their clients.

Here's who we talked to:

John Basso, CIO and Co-Founder, Amadeus Consulting | John Purrier, CTO, Automic | Laszlo Szalvay, Director of Sales and Partnerships, cPrime | Scott Rose, Senior Director of Product Management, and Miikka Andersson, Product Manager, CollabNet | Jeanette Cajide, VP of Corporate Development and Samer Fallouh, VP of Engineering, Dialexa | Andreas Grabner, Technology Strategist, and Brett Hofer, Global DevOps Practice Leader, Dynatrace | Anders Wallgren. CTO,Electric Cloud | Alexander Polykov, CTO, ERPScan | Baruch Sadogursky, Developer Advocate, JFrog | Rob Juncker, VP of Engineering, LANDESK | Mike Stowe, Developer Relations Manager, MuleSoft | Zeev Avidan, VP of Product Management, OpenLegacy | Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali | Sushil Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, Robin Systems | Nikhil Kaul, Product Marketing Manager, SmartBear 

We asked these executives, "What technical solutions do you use when developing software?"

Here's what they had to say:

• We base our platform on the Node.js runtime environment. We also use PostgreSQL (Postgres) and Elastic search. We use Hapi.js open source framework for our API layer. It’s built with configuration over convention and has authentication and validation built in. Lastly we use EmberJS with its MVC structure to build fully scalable applications with various routing controls.  It is JavaScript and runs on Node.js and is portable to a number of different platforms.
• We rely on open source projects with our software. We use cloud servers since it’s much easier than managing our own.
• We have a huge ecosystem of tools and web technology including Microsoft, Java, Android, IOS, and Android. The cornerstone is Microsoft Team Foundation Server for bug tracking and epic stories. Git and GitHub for collaboration and source code management. IDE’s like Microsoft Visual Studio, Intel ID, and PHP Storm. Security ecosystem reshaper, static code analysis tools make sure the technology meets international security standards. You must use security tools or you’re putting yourself, and your company, in a very risky situation.
• Very little is proprietary these days. A lot of Open Source, Gerrit (derivative of Git) distributed and maintained by Google. Open source subversion core staple. Jenkins (Cloudbees) build and CI tool. Use Team Forge for software development incorporating the tools inside and connecting IP. Also use Review Board and Nexis. We use open source in a higher value way. We build products and workflows by enterprise with complicated compliance and workflows moving to open source as the core of the portfolio.
• We are growing open source componentry and we’re built on .Net. We are moving to use of Linux technology and containers away from Microsoft proprietary products to an independent front end. We are starting to implement microservices. We just open sourced the bottom of our platform. More collaborative development has led to a huge shift with our clients. We are publishing our public code base to GitHub.
• We use Docker containers and are active in the the open container initiative. We are building application driven solutions that scale out storage -- an app controller that sees containers.
• Atlassian, JIRA, Confluence, Cloudbees, Puppet, Red Hat with their recent acquisition of Ansible, Agile Craft, and Tasktop for software lifecycle integration.
• We build on top of a lot of Java Open Source utility libraries with the user interface in JavaScript.
• We use Redmine for cloud development and management. We are looking to change all our solutions to manage software documentation and the control versions of the documents. We’re looking at three different automated testing solutions.
• Web Front End: JavaScript, AngularJS, HTML 5, Responsive Design. Microsoft Azure: C#, .Net, Web Apps. iOS (iPad/iPhone): Objective C, Location Services, Google Cloud Platform: Python, App Engine. Android: Java, Location Services, Gamification. Storage: SQL, NoSQL, Object Store, Table Store. Internet of Things: Bluetooth, BLE. Custom Integration: Hardware, Web Services, Proprietary APIs. Legacy: ASP.Net, Relational DBs.
• Featured technologies include: Java, .Net, PHP, Node.JS, iOS, Android, AWS, Azure, CloudFoundry, Docker, VMWare, Sharepoint, SAP Hybris, Demandware, Magento, SAP, Citrix, Oracle, Oracle DB, MSSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and NGINX.
• Partners include: VMWare, Pivotal, Jenkins, Gradle, CloudBees, SpringSource BlackDuck, Atlassian, Grails, JetBrains, CA Technology.
• Evolved using a Git repository. Jenkins as automation. We use our own software for CI and testing. Hand off to release automation product.
• Our stack: development = Collaborator and AQTime. The peer review process lowers defects downstream when writing code, you can see if there are any leaks. Test the front end with Desktop TaskComplete and TestLeft. Backend = Soap UI and Soap UI NG. Roll-out = AlertSite and Cloud Testing. Swagger = API definition tool. End-to-end tools.
• We use a range of technical solutions, with the belief that you have to choose the right tools for the job, not the tools that claim to do all things. For this reason, we take advantage of multiple programming languages (JavaScript, Node.js, Angular, ReactiveJS, PHP, Java, .Net, and others), collaboration and tracking tools (prototyping, UI/ UX capture tools, code repositories (i.e. Git), Agile Tracking/Issue trackers (GitHub, Jira), API tools (RAML, Anypoint Platform), Messaging systems/queues (JMS, AnypointMQ), Integration tools (Anypoint Studio, Mule Runtime), cloud/distributed hosting, and many other technologies.

What solutions are you using that we didn't mention?